Is the key to inclusive practice a generous and accommodating leader?
Or does it depend on a single artistic director with a strong vision?
The leadership models that emerged from the UK practices suggested something different. Leadership was not primarily understood as a matter of individual personality or talent, but as a question of structure: who makes decisions, where consultation takes place, and how time and responsibility are organised.
What was being explored was not simply how to identify the right leader, but how decision-making, leadership, and succession could be shared, sustained, and continually reconfigured over time.
Not Entrusting Leadership to a Single Role
Candoco is currently exploring how artistic decision-making and leadership can be shared.
Rather than placing the multiple functions traditionally held by an Artistic Director—such as shaping curatorial direction, making artistic decisions, and supporting artists—within a single role, the organization is exploring a model in which an “assembly” is convened whenever significant decisions need to be made.
The central question is how decisions are made: who is involved, and how different forms of expertise, experience, and perspective can contribute to the process.
“We’re going to have a distributed artistic direction. We’re going to form an assembly every time we need to make a curatorial decision.”
—— Melanie Precious, Candoco Dance Company
Time Is Not a Cost, but a Condition of Practice
Stopgap’s ongoing company classes, DanceSyndrome’s extended rehearsal periods, and the many years of practice accumulated by AMICI all point to a similar understanding.
In each case, the time required for the work was not treated as a limitation or inefficiency. Rather, taking time was understood as a fundamental condition of the practice itself.
Movement needs time to settle into the body. Relationships need time to develop. New roles and pathways need time to emerge.
None of these processes unfold at the pace of a short-term project. They require a different rhythm—one that allows learning, trust, artistic growth, and shared experience to accumulate over time.
Time, therefore, is not an operational luxury. It becomes a precondition that supports both collaborative work and artistic quality.
“When working with people with learning disabilities, we know that time is really important. So we need a longer rehearsal period.”
—— Sophie Tickle, DanceSyndrome
Inheritance Is Not About Preserving Ideals, but Preserving Conditions
It was striking that after the death of its founder, AMICI did not rush to formalize its methods.
Similarly, Candoco described itself not as a group of founders, but as custodians of the company.
What matters is not preserving past forms exactly as they were.
What matters is recognizing what is essential to a practice, and protecting the conditions that allow it to emerge, while adapting outward forms to changing times and environments.
For AMICI, this meant protecting the principle of being together, and allowing creation to begin from performers’ own improvisations.
For Candoco, it meant holding a long legacy while updating organizational structures and decision-making in response to present realities.
Inheritance, then, is not about fixing a method permanently. It is about preserving core conditions while allowing them to remain alive in new environments.
“We are stewards, we are the custodians of the company, we are not the founders.”
—— Lucie Mirkova, Candoco Dance Company
■ What Emerged
Candoco is re-examining the structure of a company that has evolved over 35 years, exploring ways to support artistic decision-making through multiple people and areas of expertise, rather than placing it in the hands of a single role.
At Stopgap, long-term employed dancers sustain continuous company classes, through which techniques, relationships, and artistic perspectives are gradually passed on.
At DanceSyndrome, weekly ongoing programs and extended rehearsal periods do more than deepen understanding and relationships. They also create the foundation through which people can move from participating, to supporting, to leading, and even to engaging in choreography.
What emerges from this is an understanding of leadership as something that does not reside solely in one individual or a single role.
Who makes decisions. How time is protected. How practice is passed forward.
Leadership appeared within the organization of these conditions themselves.
■ Returning to Practice: Questions for Your Own Context
In our own environments, where are important decisions concentrated?
And where is time being protected—not to rush judgment, but to allow it to mature?